With the raging success that is Guitar Hero, there’s little doubt that the music rhythm genre on
the console space would be the next most-cloned game type until the Next Big
Thing. Granted, Guitar Hero itself is
basically a clone of Konami’s Guitar
Freaks arcade game, and now it seems everything is going full circle – and we
can’t call Rock Band a clone of Guitar Hero, as Harmonix was behind the
birth of both franchises.

The real impetus for this blog, however, is the reveal of the
different drum set hardware for each game series. The latest Game Informer magazine shows the
first image of the drum kit for the upcoming Guitar Hero 4 game, which will obviously feature drumming to keep
up with that other music game.

Now, I don’t expect that every music game will follow
peripheral standards of having five colored buttons and a strum/beat method
(though I’m sure Xbox 360 owners loved the ability to use Guitar Hero guitars with Rock
Band, a feature PS3 owners couldn’t enjoy). After all, having different hardware
will hopefully spawn more creativity... but really, I won’t be able to put up
with having three different drum kits just to be able to fulfill some rock star
dream.

That’s right, three
drum kits! In addition to the current kit for Rock Band, and the upcoming one for Guitar Hero 4, Konami is going to try reclaim some of the bemani
share it has lost with Rock
Revolution. The main focus of Rock
Revolution will be drums, though it won’t be strictly a DrumMania entry as it will also allow
for guitar and bass.

So this is how things will soon look for video game drummers:
Rock Band drums with its four colored
pads and a pedal; Guitar Hero 4 with
its three colored pads, two raised cymbals and a pedal; and Rock Revolution with six pads and a pedal. In other words, a very, very cramped and cluttered gaming area.

At least one thing will be common between the drum kits for Rock Revolution and Guitar Hero: they both aim to be much quieter than Rock Band’s kit.

"A politician stumbles over himself... Then they pick it out. They edit it. He runs the clip, and then he makes a funny face, and the whole audience has a Pavlovian response." -- Joe Scarborough on John Stewart over Jim Cramer